Understand from Google Analytics as to how responsive your website is

Responsive web design is the ongoing trend to cope with increasing multi device usage. Responsive design aims to keep the site scalable and adaptable in mobile devices as mobile Internet usage is predicted to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014. 67% users claim to stick to only mobile responsive sites, thus its responsive design and development that would bring in more traffic to a business site. If you want to know whether your responsive designed site is responding well to meet the desired purpose, Google Analytics will help you out!

The new approach to responsive design and Google Analytics

Google with 67% search market share recommends responsive web design for search optimization and to keep site’s loading time, graphics and readability intact across mobile devices as well. Unlike early days of responsive web design, when break points were created for few specific screen sizes, testing and monitoring performance was an easy affair, the story is not the same now. With multiple devices, the idea is to start with the content and set break points when the content breaks. It eliminates the need to test and check to any particular device. This means targeting the commonness of various devices through a term called “form factor”. WURF.js and Google Analytics aid to view and analyze performance metrics across form factors. Diverse range of devices has necessitated the concept of create once and run everywhere. According to Luke Wroblewski there are three categories to identify device experiences and devices vary between these categories bringing out the form factors. They are usage or posture, input method, output or screen. Therefore, form factors can be critical dimension through which to monitor responsiveness would be meaningful. And this is what is behind Google Analytics.

How WURF.js works with Google Analytics?

WURFL.js is a JavaScript file which gives information about the devices whether desktop browser, tablet, or mobile phones accessing a page. Let’s check it works:

Feeding data and analyzing through Google Analytics

You start by adding this script to your page

<script> type=’text/javascript’ src=”//wurfl.io/wurfl.js”><script>

This will produce a global WURFL object that can be accessed through JavaScript console.log(WURFL.form_factor);

Once the script tag is in place, next step is to add the highlighted lines of code to Google Analytics’ tracking code. The data generated can be put into Google Analytics tool for analysis through custom variables. This will produce custom reports which are accurate than the standard ones.

Dashboards in Google Analytics help to visualize important insights and metrics to track and monitor how a website responds and functions across form factors. Bounce rate and page impressions per visit are good metrics to start with.

Thus performance per form factors is a vital metric to monitor a website and Google Analytics with WURL.js help to comprehend this data well.